Features - ORCID

Researchers are at the heart of ORCID and the center of everything that scholarly and research publishers do. Accurate author and reviewer information is vital to indexing, search and discovery, publication tracking, funding and resource use attribution, and supporting peer review. ORCID tackles the following problems:

Author disambiguation via a unique persistent identifier
A trusted list of activities attached to the identifier
Improved accuracy and time savings when submitting scholarly works, applying for grants and reporting.

ORCID offers a number of features to support our vision and our mission. We provide the registry, a public API, a member API, an annual public data file plus services to support our members. We try our best to balance the needs of the researchers, the institutions they work with and the wider community.

The registry and services are constantly evolving as we work to fulfil our mission. You can see what is coming up next on our product roadmap.

Where can I find the product roadmap?

ORCID is committed to being open and transparent. This means our product roadmap is available for anyone to view, as is the work currently in development.

The Product Roadmap is central to the ORCID product development process. Requirements travel from team-managed trello boards, through the Product Roadmap trello board and onwards to the Current Development trello board, where they are implemented and moved to our production systems.

This board contains well-defined requirements that are scheduled for implementation at some point, and a list of prioritised requirements scheduled for implementation in the near term.

Where do requirements come from?

Requirements are gathered from many sources by ORCID staff. They may originate from member requests, consortium feedback, user testing, strategic projects and bug reports amongst others. In addition, all ORCID teams generate their own internal requirements, such as website changes, infrastructure upgrades and operational systems updates. Each card is tagged with the team that produced the requirement – comms, strategy, tech, engagement or operations.

How do things on the roadmap?

ORCID aims for a balanced product development cycle and has regular cross-team meetings to discuss near and long term priorities. We try our best to address bugs, new features, technical debt, website updates and strategic items equally.

How can I contribute to the roadmap?

We welcome suggestions on how to improve the ORCID registry. Please send any feedback to our team.

In addition, ORCID is an open-source project and we welcome contributions to our source code as well as all our repositories.